BioWare Has Identified Anthem Issues, Patch Coming Soon

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Earlier this week, BioWare’s already-beleaguered shooter, Anthem, took a self-inflicted wound. After the game’s first patch dropped, players began reporting crashes, instability, and even a bricked console while playing on the PS4. This last was a genuine concern, given how rare it would be for a game to somehow kill the platform it was being run on, and how serious an issue such a flaw would represent for both BioWare (for having shipped it) and Sony (for having allowed it through whatever quality control procedures the company has in place for online updates).

Now, BioWare has responded to these concerns directly, with news of further updates. Good news on at least one front: After working with the community and extensively analyzing bug reports, BioWare is not aware of anyone actually winding up with a dead console, reddit reports aside. The company does note that anyone who runs into such problems should still contact them.

Chad Robinson, BioWare’s head of live service, tweeted out the following earlier this week:

UPDATE: We’ve identified several causes for the temp power-down crash some PS4 users experienced. Fixes for the top issues are in patch next week. If you encounter a game crash where your PS4 console won’t respond, you can manually power down and restart it – no risk of damage.

Anthem’s lead producer, Ben Irving, echoed this point in a Twitch stream. Bioware apparently “discovered a bunch of things that were causing crashes, and we’ve addressed them in our patch.” Irving also reiterated that no PS4 consoles have apparently been bricked by the game, saying: “In all the instances we’re aware of that we’ve investigated in partnership with first-party, they can be powered back up if you know how to just turn the power back on, and cycle it properly.”

It is not clear how Anthem is selling overall, yet. The game has topped the UK physical sales charts two weeks in a row, but physical sales are an increasingly small percentage of the total market. It’s also taken third place on the Xbox Gameplay chart, which tracks the most-played games on the platform.

It isn’t clear yet if the upcoming Anthem patch will also fix an issue in which the weakest gun in the game did the most damage, despite appearing to fire much weaker shots. (The numbers being shown to players for damage values looked right, but the actual number of shots it took to kill enemies clearly showed that low-level weapons were doing more damage). Polygon reports that BioWare will fix this problem “real soon,” but it isn’t specifically listed as being solved in the upcoming patch.

The game clearly needs additional coats of polish, but hopefully, the long-term prognosis will be more positive than some of the other high-profile crash and burns we’ve seen in the past 12 months. After Mass Effect Andromeda’s implosion, BioWare needs a win.